This week Bernie Sanders, now out of the running for the Democratic Party presidential nominee, expressed some skepticism about the demand to defund the police in an interview in the New Yorker. That demand has become a rallying cry for the protests against racist police brutality that have arisen in the wake of the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But while Sanders echoed some of the core concepts animating the demand — like reassigning mental health and addiction services to non-police agencies — he didn’t explicitly lend it his approval.

Sanders didn’t outright say we shouldn’t defund the police, though he did say police officers should be well-paid. Instead, he expressed disagreement with the idea that police departments should be abolished, which he seemed to conflate with defunding. The interviewer also conflated them in his question, asking, “A lot of people in the progressive movement now are calling for defunding or abolishing the police. Do you — ” to which Sanders responded, “Do I think we should not have police departments in America? No, I don’t. There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments.”

One of Sanders’s political strengths is his ability to pinpoint demands that are ambitious enough to raise ordinary people’s expectations and transform the way they think about the relationship between politics and their daily lives, but not so much that they seem impossible and fail to resonate. Sanders has always carefully walked a tightrope of trying to expand people’s imaginations without losing credibility or popular confidence.